AWS Lambda vs CouchDB

When adding a new feature to Checkly rearchitecting some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda . The short story:

• Developer Experience trumps everything.
• AWS Lambda is cheap. Up to a limit though. This impact not only your wallet.
• If you need geographic spread, AWS is lonely at the top.

The setup

Recently, I was doing a brainstorm at a startup here in Berlin on the future of their infrastructure. They were ready to move on from their initial, almost 100% Ec2 + Chef based setup. Everything was on the table. But we crossed out a lot quite quickly:

• Pure, uncut, self hosted Kubernetes — way too much complexity
• Managed Kubernetes in various flavors — still too much complexity
• Zeit — Maybe, but no Docker support
• Elastic Beanstalk — Maybe, bit old but does the job
• Heroku
• Lambda

It became clear a mix of PaaS and FaaS was the way to go. What a surprise! That is exactly what I use for Checkly! But when do you pick which model?

I chopped that question up into the following categories:

• Developer Experience / DX 🤓
• Ops Experience / OX 🐂 (?)
• Cost 💵
• Lock in 🔐

Read the full post linked below for all details

We implemented our first large scale EPR application from naologic.com using CouchDB .

Very fast, replication works great, doesn't consume much RAM, queries are blazing fast but we found a problem: the queries were very hard to write, it took a long time to figure out the API, we had to go and write our own @nodejs library to make it work properly.

It lost most of its support. Since then, we migrated to Couchbase and the learning curve was steep but all worth it. Memcached indexing out of the box, full text search works great.